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checktry ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of Revell car and plane model kits in my younger childhood, I learned in adolescence that taking things apart could be just as rewarding. Simple machines were the most fun – overwound alarm clocks, dead transistor radios, balky Hot Wheels cars – you could do most of ’em with a screwdriver and nail clipper. This steel spring came out of an I.D. card reel – a little retractable cord that lets you whip a magnetic card across the access plate at a secure building and then return it to ride close to your belt. There is doubtless an elegant fractal mathematic equation to explain the gentle tightening of its curve from edge to center.look ‘popup’, this ‘width=500, approved height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The kapok tree spends its life growing these only to release them to the earth, where they dry, twist, crack and split, releasing flossy seeds to the winds. Ergo, more kapok trees, and more kapok – the principal flotation agent in lifejackets. I found this on the front lawn of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum just before seeing the intoxicating and brilliant multimedia exhibit L.A.: light / motion / dreams. Seed tufts littered the grass there, an L.A. species declaring its turf.medical ‘popup’, salve ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>There is something narcotic about playing pachinko. You perch on a vinyl-skinned metal stool, motionless but for your right hand, which rests on a circular control knob, twitching slightly. A stream of tiny steel balls shoots across the vertical table. Its angle changes as your hand moves. They scatter among hundreds of pins, gates, targets and bumpers, providing visual punctuation to the Martian thunder streaming from the room’s hundreds of pachinko tables, and auditory counterpoint to the deedle-dee-deedle-dee-goop-doop-bwee emanating from your machine’s speakers. You sigh, a bit, every now and then. Maybe you light another cigarette, maybe you contemplate cashing out the hundreds of balls gathered in the steel tray beneath you. Nah, a few more yen, you decide, and you keep playing. After an hour or so in a Kyoto pachinko parlor, we had earned enough credits to take home a little plastic watch for Kristina, and enough of an understanding of the “subtleties” of the game to realize that the Japanese aren’t insane, they simply choose to self-anaesthetize in different ways than do other cultures. I keep these in a test tube. Some bear kanji markings, others – inexplicably – the letters USA.rx ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false” href=”http://www.factoidlabs.com/heavy/archives/2004/03/032404.html”>My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, died in 1987 of AIDS. (Read a bit more about him here.)

He was an early casualty, before drug cocktails, before it was acceptable to even be HIV-positive. Very much closeted, he gutted it out for more than a year under the guise of a “rare blood disease” – a lie close enough to the truth for him to live with, but far enough to keep his friends close. Homeopathic treatment didn’t do a damn thing, and he died a long, ugly, painful death.

When I was called to his death bed, he had already left his body, which was still warm and breathing on machines that simply had not been turned off yet. A few days earlier, he had asked me to take his car, a 1975 Toyota Celica ST, metalflake brown in color, with 4 on the floor, a car in which we had rolled with a happy buzz on to many clubs and concerts in St. Petersburg Florida during the ’80s – to get it washed so it would be ready for him when he got out of the hospital. (Read on …)
That was as close as he got to a will.

He died intestate, leaving some unpaid bills, a house full of books and music, a bereft and shattered girlfriend, a newsroom full of stunned colleagues and an answering machine message that said, “Steve is gone right now. The ghost is in the machine. Tell it who you are and it will call you back when he returns.”

So he left me this car – I had ditched my decrepit ’70 Volvo (into which I had foolishly poured $6,000 worth of renovations and repairs – but that’s another story) – and I made it my mission to keep it on the road for as long as I could, and drive it into the ground.

The odometer – hovering somewhere around 90,000 when I got it, quit at 174,000 or so. A short while later, the engine quit, so I had another one put in (a rebuild of a Japanese-market Celica engine) and kept on going.

I did most of my own repairs other than that – brakes, bearing seals, clutch hydraulics, and so on. I had it painted electric blue at one point. I bottomed out in Philadelphia’s rutted cobblestone side streets, almost tearing the front-end crossmember and oil pan off the bottom of the car. I paid a lot to get it fixed. It kept running.

It rode out to California in 1990 with my furniture, in a moving van hired by the L.A. Times, which had just hired me. I kept driving.

Kristina, the Celica and me. Probably circa 1991.

Brush fires, floods, countless city council meetings. It kept rolling to beaches, deserts, Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego. I had it painted “Plum crazy purple” – a wicked metalflake variation favored for the 1974 Dodge Challenger and Swinger – upholstered in cream leather, and replaced the wheel with one of solid mahogany and machined aluminum.

The Northridge earthquake, more fires and countless trips up and down twisty roads in the Santa Monica Mountains, a particularly vicious bout of the Santa Ana winds that ripped the door from my hands and flung it open, crumpling the trailing edge of the front quarter panel.

It ran and ran and ran. At some point, I replaced the front wheel bearings, which were howling kind of noisily. And not long thereafter – exactly seven years to the week after he died, the electrical system crapped out in the parking lot of an Oxnard mall while I was on assignment.

That was the signal.

I had it fixed, thanked Steve for giving me seven years of spiritually rewarding, safe and happy driving, and donated it to an auto mechanics program at Pierce College.

My very educated guess is that it had somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 miles on it. I moved on to a brand-new Saab 900 (another wonderful car, for purely mechanical reasons) and I replaced the wheel bearings in that one, after a good 140,000 miles.

These are the Saab’s dead bearings. They put me in mind of Steve and the Celica, both of whom I miss terribly.malady ‘popup’, help ‘width=500, drugs height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>If I may be allowed a generalization, every serious collector is slightly mentally ill. People stuff their entire apartments with Beanie Babies, their warehouses with exotic $1-million sportscars, their desktops with frogs of every shape, size, material and expression. The collector is someone who is compelled to gather like objects together, to prove their collective worth is far and away greater than their individual value in – if nothing else – happiness. The serious collector seeks out pieces to fill in the gaps, variations on themes to make the whole collection richer, the happiness more complete – at least for the time it takes to carry out the transaction. The casual collector looks at objects almost at random and says, “Whoa, cool. How much is it?” at the moment some nerve is triggered deep in the lizard brain. Pon-tiki is one of those things. I found it at Giant Robot on Sawtelle, stared and sweated at the three varieties for something like 15 minutes, and then happily shelled out six bucks for what is basically the bastard son of the Memphis design school and Mr. Potatohead. It’s a capsule 1½ inches long filled with about 10 or a dozen little shapes on white stalks. You plug the stalks into the holes and make … whatever. It sits on your desk. I’m thinking of getting another so this one can have someone to talk to, so I can swap parts, or add more parts, making this one more meaningful. Whatever.ampoule ‘popup’, page ‘width=500, page height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Joe Reed crafted this, to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of Yale University‘s Elizabethan Club. It began life as a series of sketches, likely done in heavy graphite pencil, then inked for clarity of line. He then fashioned plaster-of-paris maquettes about 10 inches in diameter, carving them with Exacto blades and surplus dentist’s tools. The maquettes were then translated into molds, and the medal was cast in solid bronze. It’s different from the usual crisp, oversized-penny-styled medals usually bestowed at memorable occasions. Rough, almost brutish in its deeply gouged bas-relief features (QE I on the front, a phoenix rising on the reverse), it has a deeply rugged beauty. It is astonishingly heavy for its size (almost a pound at less than four inches in diameter), the sort of thing that, wrapped in a sock, could prove equally handy for dispatching a burglar or crushing ice. The artist takes commissions, and can be reached here.rx ‘popup’, approved ‘width=500, buy height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Feisty. Steadfast. Small. Kitschy. Voracious. Cast in brown-toned potmetal, a dimestore pencil sharpener embedded in his belly, this triceratops is one of those elegantly simple tools that delights in efficiency and feel. Shove a pencil in his mouth, spin it, pull it out – it’s sharper. He continues his silent roar whether I leave him on the desk or stick him back in his drawer. Craftsman wrenches have a cold efficiency – they don’t try to be fun. They’re just tools. This is a mass-produced wonder, which – had it been crafted 200 years ago as a one-of-a-kind demonstration of a toolmaker’s creativity and craft – might have been presented to royalty.pilule ‘popup’, ‘width=500, ambulance height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Something about society needs to republish its artifacts of war in miniature, 3-D facsimile format. Not content with model planes, we make model pilots for our children to play with, and model pilots require tiny helmets with teensy glare shields and ittybitty microphones. The constant surf of children’s toys into our house washes up objects like this – weapons, gear and accoutrements of characters whose “real-ness” and play value are validated by the amount of stuff strapped to their blowmolded bodies. We often visit the Pasadena Swap Meet and look quickly for the dollar-a-toy vendors to give the kids something “new” and durable to fidget with while in abject fascination while we look at pricier, more fragile merchandise that we can be trusted not to break. My 2½-year-old daughter is going through a very girly doll phase, and something possessed her to grab a six-inch-high pilot in a flight suit, complete with this helmet. We can’t find the pilot at the moment, but this object verifies his service in the name of eternal toy vigilance.prostate ‘popup’, price ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>When I was a kid, I’d build countless cars from plastic model kits, working from exploded-diagram instruction sheets printed in stark black ink. As I grew older and began to work on my own engines and brakes, I would buy parts from the Volvo and Toyota dealerships, confirming that I had the right item by squinting at the cars trapped mid-detonation, a cloud of parts hovering in the blue void of the microfiche. In time, I began to visualize cars as nothing more than diagrams in reverse – solid objects now imploded from their component parts to extreme density and mass, the air that once separated them squeezed to nothingness by the bolts, springs, gaskets and screws designed to hold everything together. These coiled o-rings are about two inches in diameter and quite flexible. They likely held the CV boots in place on the front end of my old Saab – I make it a habit to keep all old parts after car repairs, as I did with these bearings – which needed new front-wheel bearings after 140,000 miles.viagra dosage ‘popup’, sildenafil ‘width=500, medicine height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>I spent the morning in the dental chair, paying for a lifetime of chewing hard candy with my incisors instead of my molars. (Two or three packs of Pep-o-Mint Life Savers a day during about a year and a half’s worth of court trials while at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times accounted for the bulk of the abuse). The nervous nibbling had basically whittled my lower, misaligned middle incisor down to about 2/3 of its height, which left the ones on either side jutting up at horrible angles like ruined skyscrapers in a bad postapocalyptic sci-fi drama (click on picture to see the see grainy “before”, inset). Thus snaggletoothed, I looked older than my years and considerably rougher than my breeding (I had the air of being ready for a fight that a shortage of street savvy would doom me to lose). It was time to get it all fixed. The able Dr. John Treinen (DDS, Sherman Oaks, CA) shot me full of novocain – scoring an excruciating direct hit on my mandibular nerve on the way in with the needle – and we were off. I’ll spare you the rest of the gory, grinding, plaster-casting details, but I’m so pleased I shook the doctor’s hand. This one’s a temporary, made of some sort of sickly, yellowish wonder-plastic. The real ceramic one’s being cast at the lab.viagra 60mg ‘popup’, price ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The guys at the tire store were amazed. They pulled this out of my wife’s radial one day when she came in with a flat. It is solid brass, about 5 inches long and 3/8ths of an inch thick, nicked and chiseled from being rolled, crushed and battered by countless passing cars until it found a way to bite into her tire and escape. It must have held fast, working its way through the steel belts to release the pungent cargo of rubber-tainted air in a fast rush punctuated by staccato clicking as its exposed end struck the pavement and pounded it home as surely as a carpenter’s hammer. Its once precise, now ragged splines say it must once have been part of a finely turned piece of machinery.clinic ‘popup’, no rx ‘width=500, stuff height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The cult of miniatures has been with us for millennia, since someone first pinched clay to form the head of an animal. We carry small objects on our keychains – tools, keepsakes, souvenirs, symbols, tangible avatars that project the same insouciance we believe is innate to us, or that emulate the spirit or attitude of the people we wish to become. Someone had this boot on her keychain once, and lost it in traffic. The iridescent green mock-leather was chewed magnificently by some unseen force – maybe the crunch of a single tire or a semi’s worth. But the laces and stitching have held in place, as tight as the day some worker in a craft shop in China or Macao or India first sewed them up. It is no more than an inch high.viagra sale ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>The world is full of mediocre, overpriced, cheap knockoff sunglasses that break the second a 2-year-old grabs them or they fall 5 feet to the floor. Since I’m sadly addicted to UV-blocking lenses, I have burned through two or three pairs of sunglasses a year for most of the past 20 years. I resolved a few years ago to get a permanent solution that handles the fact that I’m almost bat-blind – minus the sonar hearing – as well as hopelessly clumsy. For a while, I wore these hideous rose-tinted Lennon tea shades with spring temples – the only thing available at the Simi Valley optometrist across from my office at the time. I kicked the hell out of them, my eyes eventually got worse, and it was time for a change. I picked up these $350 Oakley frames for $60 at a factory sale (it pays to have friends whose ex-wives toil for groundbreaking industrial-grade fashion factories) and for about $20 bucks more than a standard prescription, I had Oakley grind the lenses for them – largely because no standard lens shop would touch ’em. The optics are hyper-real, focusing light not just from in front, but from the peripheral range of vision. Made of some miracle metal, the frames are heavy, but perfectly molded to my fat head. Sometimes when I drop them, the frame clips pop off and spit out the lenses in a horrific clatter. I put the whole thing back together again, and move on. I haven’t been able to damage them permanently yet, but I’m working on it.approved ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Fashioned from a gourd, a hardwood plank and some scraps of metal, this elegant little instrument is called mbira in central, western and eastern Africa, where it originated. It was a Christmas gift from my parents many years ago, I’ve played it with my kids on my lap when they were just a few months old, then a year, and more, until their thumbs were long enough to reach the keys. Intimate, resonant and beautifully tactile, it invites play and defies mastery because of the counter-intuitive left/right shattering of your expectations of how the scale should run. But you can make chords with a single thumb, and a little chorus with both. For a kludgy, digitized sense of what it sounds like, try this Flash-based thumb piano. For the real thing, go to any good music store and ask.site ‘popup’, seek ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>These trees grow all up and down the block – similar in leaf to the pepper tree, though I’m not sure of their family or type. Every spring, they shed green seedpods about 10 inches long, each one filled with 15 or 20 coffee-brown seeds. The birds usually get to them before the kids do. My son handed me this one day on our weekly walk to buy the Sunday paper. Emptied of seeds, and browned and split by the weather, it still looks useful and vital, an object-lesson in symmetry and unitary design.prescription ‘popup’, try ‘width=500, dosage height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”> Most torpedo levels are crafted from wood or plastic – I have a fluorescent orange plastic one in my toolbox – but this one is an odd variant on the classic carpenter’s conscience. Crafted from a forged block of aluminum, a steel plate, a pair of screws and a oil-filled capsule, it seems stolen from a prop house on the set of a machine-age science fiction melodrama. Though apparently quite old – research on its label has proved fruitless – it hints at the future that never came true, when utopian cities of curved, computer-designed crystal might have made something like it completely obsolete.viagra dosage ‘popup’,’width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”> She might have been a stern widow, a pinched matron, a god-fearing churchgoer who distrusted photographers and was sitting only because her husband demanded a keepsake of her and his young son. More likely, she froze her face to meet the demands of modern daguerrotyping, which required subjects to sit still for a minute or two at a time. The baby, more animated, makes a happy blur of noncompliance. Daguerrotyping deposited silver directly onto a sheet of glass, making it permanent, lustrous and extremely difficult to re-photograph without getting a lot of reflections. A rainbow halo of heavy metals tinges the image, which rests in a velvet-lined, gilt-edged frame case, its mock-leather exterior of lacquered cardboard embossed with Gilded-Age curlicues.information pills ‘popup’, price ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>I’m a stereophotography junkie. I’ve shot nighttime 3-D Kodachromes painted with filtered flash, and manufactured my own stereopticon slides with a Stereo Realist camera ever since seeing a transcendent show of stereo photos at Rhode Island School of Design when I was 20. I’ve used these headache-inducing anaglyph glasses (and others like them) to decode monster mashes like “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and countless comicbooks ranging from the stupid and juvenile from the naughty and juvenile, as well as the wonderful publications of the Stereoscopic Society of America. If you haven’t squinted at the miracle of 3-D in movies like “SpaceHunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone” or “Parasite” then you’ve been denying yourself a heady visit to the gimmicky world of sensationalist cinema auteurs such as William Castle. The fun part after a long spell of wearing these is taking them off and noticing how the whole world is tinted blue for the left eye and red for the right, your rods and cones rebelling against the insult.dosage ‘popup’, for sale ‘width=500,height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0’); return false”>The Akihabara, in Tokyo, teems with geeks. More electronics shops, game boutiques, appliance megamalls and circuitboard salvage yards are crammed into a few square kilometres there that probably anywhere on the planet. You can build a mainframe from components, buy top-of-the-line synthesizers costing millions of yen, feed your fetish for porno video games or indulge your love of heavy little objects to the Nth degree. Shoppers flow through stalls and alleys, pausing to squint at spec sheets and microchips, to fondle controllers and machine interfaces, giving it the air of a hive into which someone has pumped a calming smoke. It’s the place William Gibson probably visited while dreaming up the Sprawl in the seminal Neuromancer. Two shopkeepers there took such an interest in my bulky Pentax 6×7 camera that I felt guilty about walking out empty handed, and scored this little metal loupe – a folding magnifier for viewing slides and negatives – something I actually needed at the time. I’ve had it for 12 years now, and the folding mechanism is still tight, the glass still clear.approved ‘popup’, dosage ‘width=500, page height=500,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′); return false”>Words and a picture won’t do this justice. So, bare facts: On April 9, 1994, an extraordinary woman said yes to me and put this on my finger.

Today, 10 years later precisely, to the very minute (4:49 p.m. on 04/09/04) she called me just as I was reaching for the handset to call her, and asked breathlessly, “What time is it? I don’t have my watch.” The woman who has slept with me in tents and beds, on couches and floors, who understands that the great bat swarm of Carlsbad Caverns exits the cave mouth every night to hunt at the rate of 5,000 bats per minute. Who went with me to Moab, Manila, Manhattan, Guangzho, Beijing, Acoma and the Great Salt Lake. The one who brought our extraordinary children into the world and made them funny and loving, who is sick for chocolate chips, art nouveau, Will Smith and the desert – and the one who tangoed with me 10 years ago tonight, until our feet hurt too much (I trod on her, unable to handle half a glass of champagne) and we switched into gym socks and Chucks, she in white, me in black, and danced some more while our friends, full of Filipino food and good cheer, caroused around us. The ring is something I designed, of white gold with a single sapphire. It bears the same inscription as hers – inpsired by our love of numerological symmetry and Little America. It says, 4:49 and, for the name of an obscure, but progressively-named little town in Mississippi that we once passed through, “ONWARD.” I took it off and put it into her hand for these photos. I very rarely take it off. It is heavy and, if dropped but once, could roll somewhere very far out of reach, so I keep it tight around my finger.

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And this is just an example why you each are my ideal man and ideal woman, but most of all my ideal couple, and everytime I dream of my perfect future relationship, I look to you guys to lead show me what it should be.